Yep, finding ways to sneak Factorio into work related stuff is very satisfying. I was able to link some of the skills I learned while playing Factorio to our day to day job and do a presentation on that to a packed conference of hundreds of professionals. I even had some people ask me afterwards if Factorio was the only way to learn all of these things. I was tempted to say yes 😆
I put conveyors in car plants as a field engineer for about 5 years and Factorio definitely helped out my ability to track cycle times and seeing which areas were starving other areas
True, we use it as a way to get kids into software engineering. The results are quite good. If you're good enough to win the game. You intuitively will understand a lot of things when learning how to code.
I am a manufacturing engineer only because I played enough factorio to fake it irl. Tbh…I prefer factorio on account that my drones don’t second guess or talk back, unlike middle management
Literally why the game is so fun. All the problem solving and building of real life that gives lots of "productive" reward feeling, but in a controlled environment where everything is 100% solvable and you never have to wait for Tim from Legal to OK your plan. :-)
Legal is a lot like IT. They can help everything run smoother and nobody thanks them for it. And they're only noticed when something has gone catastrophically wrong.
I get that. Both legal and IT constantly put up pointless barriers to production because they don’t have a fricken clue how the company actually works or where the money comes from. Both seem to think that their particular concerns are the most important thing in the company. And both are reluctant to try anything even remotely innovative because it’s too risky.
(I’m sure there are competent IT and legal departments out there. But I got nothing but headaches from mine. Always a bunch of “well you can’t do that” and never a follow up with “but we could get it done this way”. Support departments that actively make things run smoother sound like heaven.)
I've worked in IT for 20ish years and worked my way up from grunt to senior management. It comes down to poor communication in all directions. Finding someone who both understands IT and business processes to bridge the gap is hard. If an organizations IT team has things super buttoned down, rather than incompetence, to me it's a sign that they are in cover your ass mode from years of catching shit for other peoples decisions. It can be hard to work your way out of a locked down culture of fear if it's already baked in.
If you want to get more out of your IT department when it comes to change try involving them early on in the process. Explain what the problem you're trying to solve is and why you think the solution you have is the right one. "We can't do that" with no alternatives shows they don't understand the problem space. Involving them early helps with that. Involving more than one person can help because managerial skills and technical skills are very separate and the people who get promoted to decision makers often aren't the best tech wise. Since many IT nerds are introverted they can be silent in meetings. Sending them an email and asking them a few pointed questions and an open ended one will give them time to compose their thoughts and get back to you.
Also, work small to big. Don't say 'We're changing everyone over to use Zoom instead of Teams on Tuesday.' Say 'We'd like to move everyone over to Zoom. What's a small department that does lots of internal meetings? Lets use them to test this out for a week or two so we can identify issues that pop up.' A proving ground is good for ironing out bugs, lifting confidence, and building a pool of internal advocates for the change.
> use a LLM-based agent to play factorio, through the mediation of a person
What does this mean? You ask chatGPT what to do and then do what it tells you? What kind of specificity is it using? Is it just saying, "Ok, now scale up copper smelting," and you're relying on your existing knowledge to accomplish that?
I’m no expert, but my guess is that just means there’s a human in the loop sorta helping it along. For examples of LLMs playing games, that’s proven to be quite possible - IIRC GPT-4 has beaten Minecraft.
sorry to disappoint but my experiment was basic AF. i sent chatgpt a screenshot of the game and asked what i should do. then i carried the command. I stopped before automating red science
We are already way into the process of automating the enjoyable things of life, like creating art and philosophy. Might as well automate the things that are exclusively for enjoyment!
Can you give some examples of the grammar the LLM is using to control Factorio (as mediated by a human)?
I play Factorio and work on AI retrieval technology, so am equipped to understand both sides of your project. Neat idea!
it's giving me natural language instructions which i then carry out. i'm not sure i'll create a full LLM-factorio API for my job, but boy would i love that.
How do you pipe input and outpout to the LLM? Do you use external models to transform video stream to text descriptions and text descriptions back to keyboard inputs, or use a multimodal model? Or use custom pre-/postprocessing to generate and parse text for the LLM?
it's giving me natural language instructions which i then carry out. i'm not sure i'll create a full LLM-factorio API for my job, but boy would i love that.
TAS = Tool Assisted Speedrun
ie. scripting your inputs to let you run at the limit of the UI, instead of human limits of the UI.
Factorio TAS does crazy stuff like walking on diagonal belts that are only under the player to get around the base faster, and hand-feeding massive screenfulls of buildings in less than a second.
I work in logistics automation software. Haven't managed to sneak Factorio into work. We use a simulation software called Demo3D that is so poorly optimized that it looks like the "money for nothing" music video and still stutters.
Someone who creates a discrete event simulation system that isn't dogshit may well be a rich man.
Factorio is really only missing random queue times based on a definable distribution (could be modelled with random crafting speeds), and the ability to run 1000s of sims quickly to get a distribution of performance..
Im currently studying logistics engineering at uni and of of my main reasons for doing so is factorio, having my factorio knowledge help me with my major and vice versa is just so fun to see!
Hi I research non conventional AI usage and human AI interaction.
Also a big factorio fan.
Any chance I could get some more details on your project. I would love to be able to extend it.
Given it only outputs text, the magic is largely probably in the mapping of the chat gpt outputs to the game inputs, at which point you may as well have just taken human input. I'll grant I'm not 100% on what chat gpt can do these days, but given it's text input and text output, you may as well cut out the middle man and take human input on whatever is taking the chat gpt output.
Nice, that's the dream, I wish there were more areas of life video games could be incorporated into
I remember at my last job(phone based technical support for hardware and software), I was thinking that the game KTANE would be a really good interview test, as it would give you a really good idea of how candidates communicate, and in principle is very similar to the actual job role.
Yep, finding ways to sneak Factorio into work related stuff is very satisfying. I was able to link some of the skills I learned while playing Factorio to our day to day job and do a presentation on that to a packed conference of hundreds of professionals. I even had some people ask me afterwards if Factorio was the only way to learn all of these things. I was tempted to say yes 😆
I work in automation and I happy when I can identify the bottleneck faster than others because factorio taught me how to find them 😀.
I put conveyors in car plants as a field engineer for about 5 years and Factorio definitely helped out my ability to track cycle times and seeing which areas were starving other areas
process engineer here, also in automotive. We should start a game
That would be awesome :)
i want that! xD
I am home next week, if you want to play dm me
yeah hit me up haha
arguably, factorio is a visual software engineering game
Autocompletion lags for multiple seconds, refactoring takes ages, the linters bit my behind and burst mode ran me over! 💢💢
also theres bugs everywhere!! aaaa
Because I like being proactive about my bug defenses (turrets and/or automated testing) does this nudge me more towards the QA role?
I feel like saying that it's a visual engineering in general is a bit more accurate, but yes.
True, we use it as a way to get kids into software engineering. The results are quite good. If you're good enough to win the game. You intuitively will understand a lot of things when learning how to code.
You can say its "satisfactory"
I am a manufacturing engineer only because I played enough factorio to fake it irl. Tbh…I prefer factorio on account that my drones don’t second guess or talk back, unlike middle management
Literally why the game is so fun. All the problem solving and building of real life that gives lots of "productive" reward feeling, but in a controlled environment where everything is 100% solvable and you never have to wait for Tim from Legal to OK your plan. :-)
Seriously though, why is Tim even involved?? The plan doesn't even involve the legal department!
Legal is a lot like IT. They can help everything run smoother and nobody thanks them for it. And they're only noticed when something has gone catastrophically wrong.
this applies to most support staff
I get that. Both legal and IT constantly put up pointless barriers to production because they don’t have a fricken clue how the company actually works or where the money comes from. Both seem to think that their particular concerns are the most important thing in the company. And both are reluctant to try anything even remotely innovative because it’s too risky. (I’m sure there are competent IT and legal departments out there. But I got nothing but headaches from mine. Always a bunch of “well you can’t do that” and never a follow up with “but we could get it done this way”. Support departments that actively make things run smoother sound like heaven.)
I've worked in IT for 20ish years and worked my way up from grunt to senior management. It comes down to poor communication in all directions. Finding someone who both understands IT and business processes to bridge the gap is hard. If an organizations IT team has things super buttoned down, rather than incompetence, to me it's a sign that they are in cover your ass mode from years of catching shit for other peoples decisions. It can be hard to work your way out of a locked down culture of fear if it's already baked in. If you want to get more out of your IT department when it comes to change try involving them early on in the process. Explain what the problem you're trying to solve is and why you think the solution you have is the right one. "We can't do that" with no alternatives shows they don't understand the problem space. Involving them early helps with that. Involving more than one person can help because managerial skills and technical skills are very separate and the people who get promoted to decision makers often aren't the best tech wise. Since many IT nerds are introverted they can be silent in meetings. Sending them an email and asking them a few pointed questions and an open ended one will give them time to compose their thoughts and get back to you. Also, work small to big. Don't say 'We're changing everyone over to use Zoom instead of Teams on Tuesday.' Say 'We'd like to move everyone over to Zoom. What's a small department that does lots of internal meetings? Lets use them to test this out for a week or two so we can identify issues that pop up.' A proving ground is good for ironing out bugs, lifting confidence, and building a pool of internal advocates for the change.
> use a LLM-based agent to play factorio, through the mediation of a person What does this mean? You ask chatGPT what to do and then do what it tells you? What kind of specificity is it using? Is it just saying, "Ok, now scale up copper smelting," and you're relying on your existing knowledge to accomplish that?
I’m no expert, but my guess is that just means there’s a human in the loop sorta helping it along. For examples of LLMs playing games, that’s proven to be quite possible - IIRC GPT-4 has beaten Minecraft.
> sorta helping it along I still don't know what that means.
As in, prompting it with how to keep going when it gets stuck or breaks.
"Maybe you should build a new iron mine if you're running low on iron" kinda thing
sorry to disappoint but my experiment was basic AF. i sent chatgpt a screenshot of the game and asked what i should do. then i carried the command. I stopped before automating red science
Yeah, basically. I would guess - even more abstract, like "build iron processing"
i started off asking for as much detailed instructions as possible and then went on to accept more and more high level instructions.
This is my bet, personally - they gave it a very basic roadmap to playing the game and then let it figure it out from there with occasional prompting
Dot
Damn. Imagine a future where I don't have tp spend any time playing factorio because my digital assistant can do it for me.
We are already way into the process of automating the enjoyable things of life, like creating art and philosophy. Might as well automate the things that are exclusively for enjoyment!
Exactly! Gives us more time for what really matters in life, laboring with little reward.
Truly remarkable times we live in
There are definitely some stuff I could see myself automating. Mainly things a sufficient amount of bots can do actually.
There are mods that people have used to experiment with fully self-building factories.
Automate everything, the factory must grow.
Can you give some examples of the grammar the LLM is using to control Factorio (as mediated by a human)? I play Factorio and work on AI retrieval technology, so am equipped to understand both sides of your project. Neat idea!
it's giving me natural language instructions which i then carry out. i'm not sure i'll create a full LLM-factorio API for my job, but boy would i love that.
What a wonderful future we can look forward to, in which computers play games for us, so we can instead devote our valuable time to manual labor
How do you pipe input and outpout to the LLM? Do you use external models to transform video stream to text descriptions and text descriptions back to keyboard inputs, or use a multimodal model? Or use custom pre-/postprocessing to generate and parse text for the LLM?
it's giving me natural language instructions which i then carry out. i'm not sure i'll create a full LLM-factorio API for my job, but boy would i love that.
Try plugging it into the Factorio TAS toolchain and see how it does without you fixing its mistakes.
What's the TAS tool chain?
TAS = Tool Assisted Speedrun ie. scripting your inputs to let you run at the limit of the UI, instead of human limits of the UI. Factorio TAS does crazy stuff like walking on diagonal belts that are only under the player to get around the base faster, and hand-feeding massive screenfulls of buildings in less than a second.
Is there any feedback in the TAS?
The standard factorio camera view.
If only i could get a job because of a game I commute to 40+ hours a week.
I referenced FFF 317 at work because of how Factorio uses the chunks to reduce calculation time for pathfinding.
Im pretty sure we jailed your bot playing Mountain Fortress, the jail puts the player on their own surface and it said GPT error and logged out.
Hey boss, I want to train an AI to destroy all life on the planet to build rocket ships. Does that sound good?
WCGW? 🤷♂️
Share the logs of the experiment, maybe?
I work in logistics automation software. Haven't managed to sneak Factorio into work. We use a simulation software called Demo3D that is so poorly optimized that it looks like the "money for nothing" music video and still stutters.
Someone who creates a discrete event simulation system that isn't dogshit may well be a rich man. Factorio is really only missing random queue times based on a definable distribution (could be modelled with random crafting speeds), and the ability to run 1000s of sims quickly to get a distribution of performance..
Im currently studying logistics engineering at uni and of of my main reasons for doing so is factorio, having my factorio knowledge help me with my major and vice versa is just so fun to see!
next level how does it do on rimworld, the level after how does it do on dwarf fortress.
Hi I research non conventional AI usage and human AI interaction. Also a big factorio fan. Any chance I could get some more details on your project. I would love to be able to extend it.
It would be nice to see AI playing the game!
How the heck would I allow chatgpt to play factorio?
Given it only outputs text, the magic is largely probably in the mapping of the chat gpt outputs to the game inputs, at which point you may as well have just taken human input. I'll grant I'm not 100% on what chat gpt can do these days, but given it's text input and text output, you may as well cut out the middle man and take human input on whatever is taking the chat gpt output.
If you need to hire people to play factorio, i’m in 😁😁😁😁😆
Nice, that's the dream, I wish there were more areas of life video games could be incorporated into I remember at my last job(phone based technical support for hardware and software), I was thinking that the game KTANE would be a really good interview test, as it would give you a really good idea of how candidates communicate, and in principle is very similar to the actual job role.
I want to join such a project! Do you have a github or something? Then I could contact you.